Australian Grand Prix 2014: Formula One reinvents itself at just the right time

Blazing saddles: Ferrari Formula One drivers Fernando Alonso (right) of Spain and Kimi Raikkonen of Finland pedal mountain bikes on stationary rollers to power a slot car track at the premiere of the film 'Horse Power' in MelbournePhoto: REUTERS

At this rate, Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix could be the greatest case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose since Ron Dennis decided to usurp Martin Whitmarsh as McLaren team principal, sound out the team’s shareholders and serve up an ingenious alternative candidate in the form of, well, himself.

For all those panting in anticipation of the mayhem that Formula One’s latest V6 power plants could wreak in Albert Park, it also pays to be reminded that Christian Horner still expects Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes to win “by two laps”.

Unanswerable dominance is suddenly palatable, it seems, so long as it is not delivered by a doughnut-spinning German with a pointy-fingered salute.

Talk of transformation is a little bold when one sees Dennis restored to power at Woking, Kimi Raikkonen in a Ferrari, and even outlandish predictions of a Williams driver back on the podium. What is this, 2009 all over again? Yes, in a manner of speaking, given it has been five years since the sport felt on such a ragged edge of revolution.

That moment, too, proved propitious for a British driver, as Jenson Button, who had needed to wait 113 races for his maiden victory in Hungary in 2006, suddenly waltzed to five in succession in his toothpaste-white Brawn.

Permutations for 2014 are just as fluid, to the point where few would suffer a jolt to wake up on Saturday and see Max Chilton on pole.

“It’s going to be very complicated,” Martin Brundle, normally such an astute technical brain, admits. “We’re all going to need a little patience.”

Complex for race engineers, perhaps, but exhilaratingly uncertain for fans alienated by the metronomic supremacy of “The Red Bull Years” – a book which, if ever it was written, would fire the popular imagination about as much as John Major’s memoir.

For F1 flourishes upon its caprice, its capacity for launching surprise stars straight out of left field. Valtteri Bottas qualifying third for Williams amid the downpours of Montreal was about as thrilling as it became in 2013, but the landscape from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi is nothing like so level after this torching of the rulebook.

Cars will putter to a standstill, half the field might fail to finish, while even the sound of the engines will be all but unrecognisable in light of the switch from full-throated V8 to a more mewling V6.

The sport seeks to be more ‘environmentally friendly’, we are told, although any enterprise that hauls its bedraggled foot-soldiers across 25,000 miles for the first three races alone cannot be unduly preoccupied by its carbon footprint.

No wonder Hamilton counsels that “this is going to be the most exciting year for any fan currently watching or who wants to start”.

Turbo hybrid engines, fuel limits, reductions in downforce: it all constitutes the most thoroughgoing reinvention of F1 in a generation, and it could hardly have arrived at a more opportune juncture.

Sebastian Vettel’s streak of nine straight wins might have engorged his groaning floor-to-ceiling trophy cabinet at home in Walchwil, Switzerland, but the monotonous purgatory was “destroying” the spectacle, in Hamilton’s words.

So, after DRS and KERS, F1 has chosen to inscribe ABV among its recent ruses. Anything But Vettel.

Unfair, maybe, but the quadruple world champion accepts as readily as anybody that this is a world where one must innovate or die. The casual follower, disillusioned at seeing Vettel eclipse the opposition in the same fashion as Deep Blue dealt with Garry Kasparov, cares not for seeing whether he can overhaul Alberto Ascari in Australia with a 10th victory in succession, but simply for a rekindling of the show.

The unreliability of the Renault engines, coupled with the mighty advantage of Mercedes in pre-season testing, promises to deliver just the right intoxicating concoction.

One must merely hope that the revived Silver Arrows do not do for this campaign what Dietrich Mateschitz’s energy drinks company have done for the last four, by streaking into the sunset too soon. The FIA’s move to award to double points to the finale in Abu Dhabi, desperately contrived though it is, at least aims to avert that outcome.

Any fairweather fans spooked by the profusion of fresh faces – in McLaren’s Kevin Magnussen, Russian starlet Daniil Kvyat at Toro Rosso, and Marcus Ericsson at Caterham – can equally be comforted by some nostalgic echoes of the past. Take, for example, Dennis’s pronouncement upon the fortunes of McLaren: “The company was a little unfit, it needs to get fit and there is a pain to getting fit.”

From the man who once told us that Fernando Alonso helped make “car-developmental progress more linear”, this was a prime example of convoluted ‘Ron-speak’, itself assumed to have become almost as much of a dying art as a competitive race.